May Says Goodbye to Four Decades at Rice as Student, Coach, and Administrator

By Dana Benson • Photography by Tommy LaVergne

When Rice faculty and staff who have worked at the university for 25 years retire, they are given a tree on campus in their name. That way, they’ll be a part of campus forever.

Bobby May will certainly have a tree in his name. But the Rice campus will bear other lasting memorials to May, who retired this summer after 39 years in the athletics department, 18 of them as athletic director. His influence can be seen in Rice’s athletic teams, which make up a program that, over the last 12 years, has seen its greatest success and shows promise of a bright future.

In addition to nearly four decades working at Rice, May is a Rice graduate. The Dallas-area native attended Rice from 1961 to 1965, graduating cum laude with a bachelor’s of commerce degree. May was a part of Rice’s highly competitive track and field team during that time, winning the NCAA high-hurdle title in 1965 and four Southwest Conference hurdles titles.

“Back then, just as it is today, the chance to go to Rice was very compelling,” May says. “I had a full scholarship, so it was a really great opportunity. My experience as a student–athlete was a wonderful one, but I never expected to return to Rice and spend my entire career here.”

Bobby May

After graduating, May worked for two years in management programs for John Deere and Ford Motor Company. He hadn’t thought about pursuing coaching as a career, but when he was approached about returning to Rice as the assistant track coach and business manager, he jumped at the chance. “It offered the business side and also enabled me to get back to what I had spent my whole life doing—participating in athletics, which obviously was one of my first loves.”

May served as assistant track coach for eight years and then spent four years as head coach. Along the way, he says, he was involved in almost every aspect of athletics operations, from running the concessions to overseeing football games at Rice Stadium, which included Friday night high school games, Saturday Rice games, and even Oilers games during May’s first year here.

He was named athletics director in 1988, taking over a program that hadn’t won a championship since 1971. But May led Rice through a remarkable turnaround starting in 1994, when the football team and the women’s cross-country team won their respective Southwest Conference championships.

“That was a watershed year for us,” he recalls. “All of a sudden, we were able to show that we could win.”
Since then, Rice has done a lot of winning—35 conference championships from 1994 to 2006. In 2003, the Owls won the national championship in baseball, one of the highlights of May’s career. He counts as another highlight the outstanding academic achievement of Rice’s student–athletes, whose performance in 2002 merited the USA Today/NCAA Academic Achievement Award for maintaining the top graduation rate in the nation.

May has guided Rice athletics through difficult times as well. The program suffered a devastating blow, May says, when the Southwest Conference disbanded in 1996. Rice joined the Western Athletic Conference, spending nine years there and winning 26 championships. But there were drawbacks to the WAC, including increased travel to compete against schools on the West Coast and in Hawaii and difficulty developing new rivalries.

“People in Texas, including myself, grew up with the SWC. All of a sudden to not be in that league and playing those teams was a big adjustment for everybody,” May explains. “The collapse of the Southwest Conference had a big affect on recruiting and every aspect of our athletics. People aren’t going to want to participate in your program if they just don’t relate and have the familiarity with the other schools in the conference.”

Just as Rice began to establish WAC rivalries, that conference blew up as well. May describes the last decade as “a tumultuous time after having been in the Southwest Conference for 80-some odd years.”

So May led the program through yet another change as Rice joined Conference USA in 2005. It’s a good fit for Rice, May notes. “The future is bright for Rice in Conference USA,” he says. “It’s a well-led conference, the universities involved are committed to the conference, and they are funded at much the same level so there’s no ‘giant’ that is going to dominate. And I think there will be some great natural rivalries.”

Rice’s baseball program is a clear winner in the move to C-USA. The conference’s baseball teams are strong, with very capable coaches and outstanding facilities. And Rice has a natural cross-town rival in the University of Houston.

May describes the accomplishments of Rice’s baseball team as “incredible,” and he lauds coach Wayne Graham. “I don’t think you can appreciate what he’s done without having been at Rice to see the challenges that he faced to build the program to where it is today, which is one of the very best in the nation. It’s not just that there’s a good year every now and then; every year the program excels.”

While May puts the accolades on Graham, others are just as quick to credit May for the success of baseball and other Rice sports. At a press conference to announce May’s retirement, Rice Board of Trustees member J.D. Bucky Allshouse, a former Rice student–athlete, commented on May’s “style and grace and integrity.”

“He hired some of the best coaches in the country,” Allshouse added, “and they’ve done an outstanding job both athletically and, just as important to the Board of Trustees, academically.”

Rice president David Leebron expressed his appreciation and gratitude toward May on news of his retirement, noting May’s leadership skills.

“One of Bobby’s many accomplishments is extraordinary judgment in the hiring of our coaches, coaches who have upheld the values of Rice University,” Leebron commented. “He leaves at a high point in Rice athletics: spectacular seasons in many of our sports and the hiring of a new football coach.”

With the addition of football coach Todd Graham and many off-season improvements to that program, including upgrades to the stadium, May leaves with a lot of optimism about the future of Rice football. Football, May says, is critically important to the overall athletics program. “If football is down, people tend to not look beyond that, even if the other sports are doing well, which is not right, but it’s the way it is.”

Along with football, men’s basketball is the other program most in need, May says. It, too, is moving in the right direction, with a study under way to evaluate the feasibility of renovating Autry Court or perhaps building a new facility, where women’s basketball and volleyball also would compete.

When he was a student, there was no women’s athletics at Rice, May points out. The creation of women’s sports in the 1970s and its evolution to the strong program it is today is one of the biggest changes May has witnessed in Rice athletics. Women’s teams have won 16 conference championships, including three in 2005 when the basketball team won the WAC championship, the soccer team claimed the C-USA title and earned a bid to the NCAA tournament, and the cross county squad earned the C-USA title, making its first appearance at the NCAA tournament in more than a decade.

The changes he has witnessed have made Rice a better place, May says. “It’s more visible locally, nationally, and internationally. Rice is a better place today because of all the hard work people have put in.”